The music recording industry is a competitive, multi-billion dollar industry. Record companies rely on sales data from music stores and airplay data from radio stations to track the popularity and success of releases from musical artists. The sales and airplay data, however, do not provide information about the type of audience that listens to a release, which tracks on a release are played and the frequency of play by a purchaser, and the names of other releases and musical artists the purchaser listens to. The record companies would be able to use this additional information, for example, to determine the most effective method to promote a musical artist, to project a period of popularity of a musical artist, and to categorize or group musical artists for marketing purposes.
Various techniques are currently available to provide information of this nature. Each of these, however, suffers from various drawbacks. One technique used in the past for gathering additional music listening data involved having an impartial third party conduct interviews with music listeners. This approach, however, required finding music listeners that were willing to participate in sometimes long surveys which may be inconvenient for the participants. A second technique used for gathering music listening data involved having a radio station or record company gather information. This technique found more willing participants, but the results obtained were suspect because of the music listener's inclination to be biased in favor of what is of interest to the interviewer.